Wifi Rider
2020 · 13m · United Kingdom
Directed by Roxy Rezvany
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tender
A queer Palestinian teenager in Amman channels his alienation into his lo-fi fashion label Trashy, after once yearning to leave for the West.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be about queer Palestinian identity and creative resistance, which should be dynamite, but the film plays it mostly straight—tenderness and contemplation are safe moves, and Rezvany doesn't seem interested in the genuinely weird contradictions lurking in that setup.
Rezvany situates herself thoughtfully within the documentary tradition of intimate portraiture, and the tonal restraint—contemplative rather than didactic—shows formal discipline; it's a film aware of how not to overstate its subject's complexity.
The entire film turns on Rezvany's choice to let the fashion design itself carry the emotional weight: watching Trashy come into being becomes the character study, and that single decision—treating lo-fi garment construction as the real coming-of-age narrative—is what separates this from a hundred other identity documentaries.